Remote Compilation Using ssh and make

Here's a quick lesson in setting up scripts to use the ssh and make commands for compiling on a remote machine.

Occasionally I use my Linux machine at
home to write code that I intend to compile on a remote machine.

While maintaining open FTP and TELNET connections to the
remote machine to handle the transfer and compilation steps is a
manageable solution, I decided to explore
ssh and
make to develop a more automated
method.

The benefits of my solution:

No need to remember which files have been
modified.

Ability to use Emacs' compilation capabilities to
move to errors in the source.

As mentioned above, no need to use FTP or TELNET,
and hence no reason to keep an open dial-up connection when not
compiling.

Automate, automate, automate—laziness is a
virtue.

Overview of Solution

My first step was to set up ssh and related tools in order to
allow secure copying of files to my remote system. While setting up
a .rhosts file is a (barely) acceptable solution, my IP address and
name is different each time I dial in, and it would be rather
awkward to change the remote system's .rhosts file each time I
dialed in.

ssh gives me a much more
secure form of authentication for copying files and executing
remote commands.

Once I had ssh behaving properly, I used Emacs'
info facility to explore implicit
rules in Makefiles and wrote a simple Makefile to handle the file
transfers and remote compilation.

As an example of the intended effect, assume my remote
machine is called “remote” (and my local machine “local”), and
I've just modified a source file called daemon.c. I would like to
execute the following commands in an automated fashion (note that
scp is a secure copy command
packaged with ssh, and that the -C option
specifies compression, useful for dialup connections):

First, I needed sshd running
on the remote system to handle my secure connections. Fortunately,
sshd was already running on the remote system in question.
According to the man pages, it can be run by any user (i.e., user
does not have to be root) and is restricted to handling connections
for that user (which should provide sufficient security for our
needs).

Then, I needed to install the ssh tool set on my local
machine. Again, ideally these would be installed in a public binary
directory such as /usr/local/bin, but any user can install them in
his/her home directory.

I also wanted a key which would allow me to authenticate
myself between systems and eliminate the need to type my password
each time I tried to run one of the ssh commands. For this, I ran
ssh-keygen and made sure not to give a pass phrase, so that none
would be needed when using my private key to establish the
connection. Listing 1 shows an
example ssh-keygen session.

Then I logged onto the remote host and copied the key file
into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If that file had already existed, I
would have appended the key file.

Following all this, I could run ssh and scp without needing
either a password or a pass phrase to connect to remote.

Now I needed a makefile to automate my system. Ideally, the
files on the remote machine would be checked to see if they were
older than the files on my local machine, and if so, they would be
replaced. To simplify matters, I decided to keep a record of the
“last transferred date” for each file by touching a corresponding
file each time I copied a source file over.

As an example, when I transferred a newer copy of daemon.c
over, I touched daemon.ct in the same directory. Any transfer of a
.h file would be marked by the creation of a file with a .ht
suffix.

After poking around the info file for make, I came up with
the Makefile shown in Listing 2.
This Makefile had one limitation in particular; I was unable to
specify command-line arguments for make on the remote machine
without writing them directly into the makefile on my local system.
While this was fine for the current application, I decided to
generalize it by creating a
run-make shell script which would
handle the remote execution of make after calling make on the local
system. Listing 3 is my run-make
shell script. I then removed the line from my Makefile which
remotely ran make. Listing 4 is
the output from a successful compilation sequence.

John Daily works for BBN (or is that GTE?) as a
systems administrator/software engineer. He spends far too much
time in front of computers. Whenever he can, he prefers to be
outside riding his new bicycle and exploring New England. He can be
reached via e-mail at jdaily@bbn.com.

Q) I had done the ssh public/private key generation process and my system get connected to remote system automatically with out password. But I want to get this executed through script and when doing this after getting connected to the remote system,the script is being not working.

for example:
#!/bin/bash
ssh 123.12.3.45 {sample ip}
echo "hai vamsi"

output:
just connecting to remote system and stopping over there.

I need your help in this regards to proceed further ,where I get connect to the remote system and then display the echo string.

Once the ssh command connects to the remote system the script is going to "pause" execution until the ssh command exits. This is normal behavior: the shell waits for each command to complete execution before it moves on to the next command.

If you were thinking that the echo command was going to execute on the remote system... it doesn't work that way. If you want to execute the echo remotely then your script needs to be:

#!/bin/bash
ssh 123.12.3.45 echo "hai vamsi"

If you want to execute more than one command remotely then you should place them in a script on the remote system and execute the script with the ssh command.